Biden: Ahead of His Time?

Last week, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to toss out President Bush’s Iraq policy and replace it with a radically different one. The support was bipartisan and included everyone from Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, to Barbara Boxer, of California. Surprised?

The new policy advocated by seventy-five senators is decentralized federalism or soft partition, depending on who’s describing it. The non-binding resolution was introduced by Joe Biden, of Delaware, the longtime senator and long-shot Presidential candidate, who has consistently been the most thoughtful elected official in Washington on the subject of Iraq. (I wrote about him back in 2004.) Biden’s proposal originated with Leslie Gelb, of the Council on Foreign Relations, almost four years ago, in a TimesOp-Ed that called for a “three-state solution” to Iraq’s political problems. Biden joined Gelb on the Op-Ed page last year; by then, Gelb’s three states had become “three largely autonomous regions with a viable central government in Baghdad,” an arrangement permitted by Iraq’s new constitution. Baghdad, a “federal zone,” would be responsible for national defense, foreign relations, and the equal distribution of oil money; the regions would handle just about everything else. The model would be Bosnia after the Dayton accords. The U.S. would give up on the Bush Administration’s failing effort to build a national unity government at the center of Iraq.

Now the Senate has signed on to Biden-Gelb, without spelling out the ethnic or sectarian composition of the federal regions. On this one vote, many of Bush’s die-hard supporters have abandoned him. What does it mean? Probably not much. The plan offers a way to blame Iraq’s national leaders for the stalemate in Baghdad, accept the reality of ethnic and sectarian division, and shift political and military responsibilities to Iraqis in the provinces. It seems to give America a responsible way out. And it’s an alternative to the Administration’s tunnel without light. For all these reasons, it has obvious appeal on both sides in Washington. For Republicans in particular, the resolution was a way to register disapproval of the current policy without voting against the President on troop commitments. I’ll be surprised if it does anything more. Like the plan itself, it’s impressive on paper, but don’t be fooled: Washington is still as divided as Baghdad.

Federalism—which, in this extreme form, is partition by another name—is the most realistic political option available. But is it viable where it matters, in Iraq? Some provinces are already making a version of it happen, doing an end run around Baghdad’s non-functioning ministries and spending money directly on local reconstruction. But the obstacles to the Biden-Gelb plan are huge. It has very little apparent support in Iraq itself, outside of Kurdistan and one Shiite faction. Iraqi politicians noticed the Senate vote even if Americans didn’t, and denouncing it was the one thing they’ve been able to agree on recently; the vote aroused their nationalism, which is still a potent force in Iraq. The plan provides no real answer to the problem of Iraq’s many mixed cities and areas, where it would likely intensify the civil war. (A lot of “cleansing” has already happened, but a lot more is still possible.) And it is not a formula for early withdrawal: it would require American soldiers to act as guarantors along the sectarian fault lines. To get an idea of the risks and difficulties, read this Brookings report on how “soft partition” might be implemented. Without a Dayton-style accord, the plan would provoke much greater violence. But if Dayton were possible in Iraq, with Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds represented by a single leader whose signature on an agreement meant facts on the ground, then who knows what else might be possible there? Unfortunately, that Iraq doesn’t exist.

After I wrote about the plan skeptically last month, one of Biden’s aides—who, like his boss, has my respect on this issue—wrote back to complain that I hadn’t done justice to it. He emphasized that federalism is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution. Sectarian militias, he argued, would be so consumed by the power struggle within their own regions that the larger civil war might actually wane. As for the resistance of Iraqi politicians: “That’s where diplomacy/leadership/engagement of the kind this Administration shows no aptitude for or interest in comes in. Milosevic, Tudjman, and the various Bosnian leaders were not exactly models of far-sighted political cooperation. We put their nose in it, together with the Euros, and they finally got to yes. Would it work here? Maybe/probably not. Is it worth trying given the stakes? Yes.”

It would take the kind of diplomatic skill that has become extinct in Washington to convince Iraqi leaders to accept autonomous regions without provoking a nationalistic backlash. With a different Iraq and a different American Administration, it could happen. Iraq is changing all the time—in the direction of fragmentation—and we’ll have a new government in January, 2009. Until then, I’m glad that Biden is pushing his idea. For all its flaws, it’s the only exception to paralysis and polarization in Washington.